Speaking to the congregation of a Black church that was also targeted by the accused killer Gregory Bush, Jeffersontown Police Chief Sam Rogers said the Wednesday shooting at a Kroger supermarket parking lot was a hate crime, Wave 3 News reported.

“The sentiments that were expressed to a witness by Mr. Bush, the suspect in this crime, are not indicative of this community. They’re not indicative of the Jeffersontown police. I wanted to call it what it was, and that’s racism in action,” the police chief stated.

Maurice Stallard, 69, and Vickie Jones, 67, were killed by 51-year-old Gregory A. Bush at a Kroger in Kentucky.https://t.co/HhZbOPzmt3

Meanwhile, Louisville GOP mayoral candidate Angela Leet also said on Sunday that the shooting was a hate crime, according to the Courier-Journal, making her one of the first local Republicans to acknowledge the obvious.

Rogers had been slow at coming to that conclusion.

Ed Harrell, a white man who witnessed the shooting and brandished his own gun for protection in the parking lot, reportedly claimed immediately after the shooting that Bush walked by him and said, “Don’t shoot me. I won’t shoot you. Whites don’t shoot whites.” Yet the chief hesitated for several days to confirm that the double homicide was race related.

Bush, 51, had attempted but failed to enter the First Baptist Church of Jeffersontown on Wednesday, according to the police. He then went to a nearby Kroger where he shot and killed 69-year-old Maurice Stallard and Vickie Lee Jones, 67, apparently at random. Bush was taken into custody shortly after he fled the scene.

In his remarks at the church, Rogers noted the parallels between the shooting in their community and the mass shooting Saturday at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, where the gunman made anti-Semitic statements before killing 11 people.

“These two most recent examples of hate crimes were carried out by evil people that base their beliefs and actions on ideas and ideals that are contrary to the good of the American people,” he said.

4. A challenge

I’m going to need @MichaelAvenatti to come on #RolandMartinUnfiltered to explain this “better be a white male” comment to @TIME. He says he never said it. But he needs to come talk to Black media. I’ve DM’d him. Waiting to hear back. This IS A PROBLEM.

10. Comedy

Continue reading Social Media Disowns Michael Avenatti After He Says Democrats Need ‘A White Male’ To Run For President

Social Media Disowns Michael Avenatti After He Says Democrats Need 'A White Male' To Run For President

[caption id="attachment_3833616" align="alignnone" width="812"] Source: Rich Polk / Getty[/caption]
It was all good just a week ago.
After riding high on the Blue wave of Democrats that's been mostly led by Black folks, Michel Avenatti all but lost the collective respect of African-Americans as soon as TIME published a story on Thursday quoting the lawyer insisting that he didn't want a Black person to run for president.
It's a little more complicated than that, but his min quote was jarring, to say the least. When asked who he wanted to see as the Democratic Party's nominee in 2020, Avenatti's answer was deliberate:
“I think it better be a white male,” he said before adding later: “When you have a white male making the arguments, they carry more weight.”
Avenatti's quotes were being circulated on social media just about an hour after Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley recommended the attorney who made a name representing a porn star be referred criminally to the Justice Department to be prosecuted for "potential violations" surrounding the confirmation hearings of Supreme Court Judge Brett Kavanaugh.
https://twitter.com/PamelaGeller/status/1055524883323441152
That came a few days after a judge ordered Avenatti to pay nearly $5 million to a former colleague in a lawsuit over unpaid back wages.
The TIME story made Avenatti's bad week a lot worse ... until folks on social media got wind of the quotes, making Thursday perhaps the lawyer's worst seven-day stretch ever.
Avenatti was being called everything from a white supremacist sympathizer to a sexist to a wannabe "white male savior." In essence, Black Twitter disowned Avanatti after virtually adopting him for being so outspoken against the president.
But now it would appear that he and Trump are more alike than not. And with a wide range of related emotions, Twitter definitely wasn't having it.